[eropple]

Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three.

As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.

[Choco31415]

If storage is a problem, couldn’t Blusky add a size limit to video uploads?

[eropple]

It's not storage, it's bandwidth. Most system providers, for Bad Reasons, charge a lot for egress; even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video. Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?

[Dylan16807]

> It's not storage, it's bandwidth.

A size limit affects both equally.

> even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video

That's only for the web service. Workers and R2 let you do video just fine. And small videos don't need any fancy logic, just toss them over http.

> Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?

No, I legitimately don't know. Why is it different from an image that gets a million views?

[numpad0]

Then people are going to link to YouTube and benefit of getting lesser copies is small. The rest of media that works within a limit on a microblogging are junk.

[notpushkin]

How does Mastodon do it?

[eropple]

By externalizing costs onto server owners, the same way they do everything.

It's not a good way to do it, though, and it's worse for Bluesky because it implies that in order to move your PDS (one of the best features of the design), you'd have to pick up the freight for video that already exists. If PDS mobility is important, attaching large economic strings to that is a big disincentive.

[rakoo]

> By externalizing costs onto server owners, the same way they do everything.

I mean that's the whole point of the Fediverse, a federated network of independent nodes. Of course the nodes take care of the functionality.

[wmf]

That gives me a great idea: If you self-host your PDS you can have video but moochers don't get it.

[eropple]

Sure, but that's Scary(tm), because an unexpected viral skeet is going to cost you a lot of money. In this case I'd expect almost all video to be fraudulent--either in terms of pirated egress or in terms of disinfomation scams.

[wmf]

Obviously you should choose a hosting provider that doesn't allow bandwidth overages.

[eropple]

In such a case you absolutely should! At the same time, it makes sense that bsky, as the protocol stewards, might not want to make that pit too easy to fall into.

[pests]

Why must we insist on calling these things after an euphemism for ejaculation?

Never going to be taken seriously by the public.

[eropple]

Because it's funny.

[mvdtnz]

Great. But without video you lose most of your users.

[sfink]

I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug.

If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one.

Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating.

If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to.

(Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)

[eropple]

I agree with this--and also, again, you have video, if you upload it to YouTube. Or stream via Twitch. Like, you don't need on-platform video. Google makes more money than God; let them pay for the perturbed bits.